illustration by Matt ChaseIn 2012, Craig Goodliffe needed an assistant to help him run his real estate and consulting businesses in Ogden, Utah. He posted a local ad for the job, but got a reply from a woman, Daphne, in the Philippines. The Southeast Asian nation used to be a hotbed for telemarketers. As spam calls became automated, that infrastructure shifted to virtual assistant services.
Despite a 15-hour time difference, Daphne proved ready to take on any and all of Goodliffe’s tasks, and quickly became his best asset. In fact, so many people in his network expressed interest in finding their own virtual assistant that in 2018, Goodliffe launched a third company, Cyberbacker, to connect entrepreneurs with virtual assistance. Read on for tips on finding your own Daphne.
Use an agency
Stefano Faustini, CEO of Brand of a Leader, and his co-founder, Marina Byezhanova, hired their Philippines-based assistant, Kate, through Outsource Access, an Atlanta firm that made Inc.’s inaugural Power Partner Awards list of B2B companies. Taking this route helped them avoid the burden of international payroll. “We don’t have to worry about the tax implications,” Faustini says. “For us, it’s just a charge on our credit card.”
Hire like you’re dating
When Worxbee founder and CEO Kenzie Biggins pairs one of her clients with a remote assistant, she approaches the process as a matchmaker– in fact, she based Worxbee’s matching methodology on Match.com’s pairing model. “Your executive assistant is usually your closest relationship besides your significant other,” Biggins says.
Her methodology assesses clients and assistants to align on soft skills–communication preferences, conflict resolution abilities, and even the gravitas needed to interact with other executives and investors.
Don’t be cheap
U.S.-based assistants can make up to six figures. Goodliffe says the assistants his company provides from the Philippines typically cost about half that. But you get what you pay for, he warns, and advises entrepreneurs to work with an agency that offers fair wages and benefits like health care: “We have people who say, ‘Well, other companies can hire someone for $2 an hour.’ I don’t doubt it, but you won’t be able to keep anybody.”
Source: Need Some Help? Here’s How to Hire a Remote Assistant | Inc.com
Critics:
A virtual assistant (VA) is a software agent that can perform a range of tasks or services for a user based on user input such as commands or questions, including oral ones. Such technologies often incorporate chatbot capabilities to simulate human conversation, such as via online chat, to facilitate interaction with their users.
The interaction may be via text, graphical interface, or voice – as some virtual assistants are able to interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices. In many cases users can ask their virtual assistants questions, control home automation devices and media playback, and manage other basic tasks such as email, to-do lists, and calendars – all with verbal commands.
In recent years, prominent virtual assistants for direct consumer use have included Amazon‘s Alexa, Apple‘s Siri, Microsoft‘s Cortana, and Google Assistant. Also, companies in various industries often incorporate some kind of virtual assistant technology into their customer service or support.
Recently, the emergence of recent artificial intelligence based chatbots, such as ChatGPT, has brought increased capability and interest to the field of virtual assistant products and services.
Virtual assistants work via:
- Text, including: online chat (especially in an instant messaging application or other application ), SMS text, e-mail or other text-based communication channel, for example Conversica‘s intelligent virtual assistants for business.
- Voice, for example with Amazon Alexa on the Amazon Echo device, Siri on an iPhone, or Google Assistant on Google-enabled/Android mobile devices
- By taking and/or uploading images, as in the case of Samsung Bixby on the Samsung Galaxy S8
Some virtual assistants are accessible via multiple methods, such as Google Assistant via chat on the Google Allo and Google Messages app and via voice on Google Home smart speakers. Virtual assistants use natural language processing (NLP) to match user text or voice input to executable commands. Many continually learn using artificial intelligence techniques including machine learning and ambient intelligence.
Some of these assistants like Google Assistant (which contains Google Lens) and Samsung Bixby also have the added ability to do image processing to recognize objects in the image to help the users get better results from the clicked images. To activate a virtual assistant using the voice, a wake word might be used.
This is a word or groups of words such as “Hey Siri”, “OK Google” or “Hey Google”, “Alexa”, and “Hey Microsoft”. As virtual assistants become more popular, there are increasing legal risks involved. Added value of the virtual assistants can come among others from the following:
Voice communication can sometimes represent the optimal man-machine communication. It is convenient: there are some sectors where voice is the only way of possible communication, and more generally, it allows to free-up both hands and vision potentially for doing another activity in parallel, or helps also disabled people.
It is faster: Voice is more efficient than writing on a keyboard: we can speak up to 200 words per minute opposed to 60 in case of writing on a keyboard. It is also more natural thus requiring less effort (reading a text however can reach 700 words per minute).
Virtual assistants save a lot of time by automation: they can take appointments, or read the news while the consumer does something else. It is also possible to ask the virtual assistant to schedule meetings, hence helping to organize time. The designers of new digital schedulers explained the ambition they had that these calendars schedule lives to make the consumer use his time more efficiently, through machine learning processes, and complete organization of work time and free time.
As an example when the consumer expresses the desire of scheduling a break, the VA will schedule it at an optimal moment for this purpose (for example at a time of the week where they are less productive), with the additional long-term objective of being able to schedule and organize the free time of the consumer, to assure them optimal work efficiency.
Related contents:
- “The Magic of Virtual Assistants and Their Impact on Customer Service”.
- “The One Thing You Should Definitely be Using AI Chatbot for”. 7 April 2023.
- “A.I. Means everyone gets a ‘white-collar’ personal assistant, Bill Gates says”.
- “Toys That Have a Voice”. SpeechTechMag.
- The machines that learned to listen”. BBC. Retrieved 5 May 2020.
- From Eliza to Internet: a brief history of computerized assessment”. Computers in Human Behavior.
- Computer power and human reason : from judgment to calculation. Oliver Wendell Holmes Library Phillips Academy. San Francisco : W. H. Freeman.
- “Smartphone: your new personal assistant – Orange Pop”. 10 July 2017. Archived from the original on 10 July 2017. Retrieved 5 May 2020.
- Amazon expands Echo lineup with new smart speaker, earbuds, and more”. XDA. Retrieved 26 May 2023.
- Web Semantics: Microsoft Project Turing introduces Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG)”. Wired.
- “GPT-4 takes the world by storm – List of companies that integrated the chatbot”. 21 March 2023.
- “Conversica Raises $31 Million in Series C Funding to Fuel Expansion of Conversational AI for Business”. Bloomberg.com.
- Amazon Extends Alexa’s Reach Into Wearables”. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 26 September 2019.
- Developing Your Own Wake Word Engine Just Like ‘Alexa’ and ‘OK Google'”. GPU Technology Conference.
- Digital Market Perfection”. Michigan Law Review.
- Everything Google Assistant can do on the Pixel”. CNET. Retrieved 10 December 2017.
- “Domino’s Pitches Voice-Ordering App in Fast-Food First | CMO Strategy”. AdAge.
- LG introduces smart refrigerator with Amazon Alexa-enabled grocery ordering”. Retail Dive. Retrieved 10 December 2017.
- “Amazon’s Alexa escapes the Echo and gets into cars | Technology”. The Guardian. Retrieved 10 December 2017.
- “What is Google Assistant, how does it work, and which devices offer it?”. Pocket-lint. 6 October 2017.
- “American Airlines (US Airways) – First US Airline to Deploy Natural Language Speech” (video), Nuance Enterprise on YouTube.
- The complete list of Alexa commands so far”
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